It's a shame, I waxed lyrical about Office 365 when it was announced... But I couldn't help but rant about the associated file-synchronisation at MS last night (original here). Don't even start me on the extent to which it's now embedded in the OS and integrated with Office... Not only is it a piece of crap, it's near impossible to get rid of it.

I have had persistent problems with OneDrive failing to sync on one of the machines in my house for the last couple of months, perhaps more. The machine has 8.1 and I suspect this started after a Windows update - but since the sync process barely gives you a clue what's going on it's hard to tell. Today I spent some time trying to diagnose the problem, following the steps found in this forum. A reset of OD appeared to resolve the issue - certainly after the hour it took to follow this process, the OD folders on this machine contained 400 MB of data that was synced from another machine yesterday. But then I realised the sync engine was only running for a few seconds before it apparently crashed, disappearing from task manager along with the system tray icon (this latter being what alerted me to problems in the first place, since the app certainly wasn't going to)

So I engaged some direct support from Jerry in the Phillipines, case 1264374787. Which resulted in a long and tortuous conversation about it being impossible that I had Office apps registered from my corporate EA but OneDrive under my personal account. Red herring, but this kind of absence of understanding characterises all my dealings with MS support around OD and 365. (No offence to Gerry who was very nice)I have about 20k files and 11GB in OneDrive.Eventually Gerry remoted into my machine - and unlinked my MS account then re-established it. Then waited half an hour for OD to re-establish that there were no changes to the data, save for one test file uploaded directly over browser. When it had finished, this file appeared in place. Good, I thought, appears to have fixed it. As I pondered more, Gerry switched to the (utterly odious) Metro app which is the only, tiny window on OneDrive's lunatic thought-process, and showed me 600 odd files uploading and 300 coming down... What?!!! And then I noticed that the sync engine appeared to have crashed again. As I frantically typed in the remote session chat window, Gerry cut the session - leaving me high and dry, with no way of recontacting him. The machine is still sitting, failing to upload 600 files and download 300. A casual glance tells me that many of these files have not been changed since long before SkyDrive existed, or Mesh even (two services that, in my experience, worked).Attempts to re-engage Jerry failed, in a procession of being given links for OneDrive support, which weren't, and a series of people helpfully providing the correct link, which wasn't. Eventually I think I got to the right place again, but my connection to <smiling agent> kept failing. 'This may be because we do not offer support at this hour: OneDrive Support is available: 24/7' (I paraphrase - but that was the gist of it.So I went downstairs, ranting at the world in general, and flicked on my laptop. Which was fully synced this morning. Checked to see if it had also synced the test file as it should. Found it was downloading 500MB of who knows what, there has been no other data in the hierarchy changed all day - I tend not to trust OD with anything in current use, just sync some fairly static - but important - content between machines. I'd love to entrust all my data to OD, given the 1TB limit, but really, you'd have to be stark staring mad to do so. Dropbox is fast (LAN sync helps a lot, but even off LAN it's speedier than any other service I've tried) and completely robust, although helpfully very transparent about what it's doing. This is why I use Dropbox for current data, including all the machines desktops. OneDrive is absolutely pant-meltingly slow at everything, randomly syncs stuff for no reason and fails to give even the vaguest hint of what it's doing, what state it's in or whether it thinks it might have an issue. If it were a horse, it would be a pitiful deaf, dumb and blind specimen. With no legs.

A cursory glance at the laptop's files, now it's finished downloading an apparently entirely random 500 MB of data, shows many, many duplicates, with machine names appended to the filename. I could check the logs and RSS reports of activity to find out what the pitiful specimen thinks it has been doing, but I can't. There aren't any. Because OD is deaf, dumb and blind. Thankfully it is unaware of Dropbox winning every file-service trophy going, at record speed. The poor, pitiful creature.Many of these files are two decades old. I last touched them... two decades ago.Who knows what will happen when I turn on the third machine that syncs with One Drive? Frankly, I'm too scared to risk it.Take it out and shoot it Microsoft, put it out of its misery. This is my data you're playing around with - and I have no confidence that I haven't actually lost any because, frankly, I don't count the files in file-sync services because I assume they are going to work when they're the product of behemoth, long-established providers, not upstarts like Dropbox. I have wasted most of the night on this and I am LIVID. Continuing to promote all the benefits of a free 1TB of space with shiny, happy people all over the place is DISGRACEFUL. The service is utterly, disastrously unreliable.Still, at least I'm not a senior member of the team in an IT organisation in a large company with a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, one that has thankfully chosen not to implement OneDrive in the Enterprise. So no-one is likely to listen to my opinion on your product.Oh. Hang on...

Two fantastic weeks away in one summer, lucky us frankly. I had no idea what to expect of Mallorca really, it was all a bit of a last minute decision - our best friends had found a super villa just North of Alcudia, we managed to find an apartment overlooking the bay about a five-minute walk away, a notional conversation one Saturday night a few weeks ago was suddenly a reality.

Well... I quickly dispelled any concerns that Mallorca might be a bit '70s-style Costa Del Sol, catering to a peculiar breed of English tourist that would rather have stayed in England on the whole. It's one of the most beautiful places on the planet